One way in which you can study how ungulates behave is by making a time budget analysis. This looks at the activities an animal does and measures how long is spent doing each activity. A time budget analysis builds up a useful picture of an animal’s life and can answer many questions about how it behaves. It is useful because it shows you how a species behaves in great detail. Before a time budget analysis can be conducted it is necessary to build an ethogram for the species of animal being studied. An ethogram is basically a list of all the separate and discernable behaviours, which an animal can show. For example this can include feeding, predator scanning, sitting in very simple ethograms, however these areas are normally subdivided into many different categories. For example a ‘tail flick’ might be recorded as a distinct behaviour on an ethogram, likewise predator scanning might be subdivided depending on where the predator is looking. Building an ethogram can be very time consuming, as it is important to really know the animal you are studying and to know most of the behaviours it can show. A relatively accurate ethogram must be built before any other behaviour research can be conducted.
Now that you have a list of all the behaviour actions an ungulate can show you need to know for how long and when it uses each one during the day. How long does a goat spend eating? How long does it spend grooming? How long fighting? By knowing these things it is possible to work out what is important in the ungulates life. Maybe when food is short more time is spent fighting. Or maybe an ungulate must eat all day just to obtain enough energy to stay alive, meaning there is not enough time for other behaviour to take place. By conducting a time budget analysis many questions can be asked and answered and a real understanding of a species can be made. Unfortunately conducting a time budget analysis can be very difficult and take much time. It is important to be able to observe individuals for long periods of time, you must also be able to observe more than one individual to make sure the behaviours you record are real and are representative. Maybe you are following an unusual individual! Normally in a time budget analysis several separate behaviours are chosen, normally the ones most useful in answering your specific questions, then you follow an individual for a certain time recording say ever 1 minute what behaviours it is doing, by doing this for many hours with many individuals a realistic picture of an animals life will be built up.
Radio tracking can answer many very basic questions about ungulates. It can be used to study home ranges, how an animal moves and travels, when it is active etc. etc.
Theory of Radio tracking
For radio tracking or radio telemetry you need two things- a receiver, and a transmitter on the animal. The transmitter emits electromagnetic radio waves in all directions. This is like when a stone hits a lake and waves are caused is circles for a wide distance. But how do you use this to radio track animals? There are two main ways to radio track animals by hand tracking and by using a fixed antennae.
Hand tracking
Hand tracking is where you have a hand held transmitter and physically follow the animals you are tracking. You receive the strongest signal when you point the receiver directly at the animal so then know in which direction it is. Hand tracking is good at determining in which direction an animal is. However it is not very accurate. It can be up to 10 degrees out. It is also very slow; it can take a long time to track a single individual. Because of these limitations it is not suitable for finding the location of a large number of individuals at once, or for finding the exact location of an animal. It can’t be used to see how an animal moves during the day on a small scale. However it is suitable in some situations, such as with animals with very large home ranges such as mountain lynx.
Fixed antennae
Fixed antennas normally use something called the null peak method to find the animal. Fixed antennae are more accurate than hand held antennas. Bearings can be taken more easily and the position of the animal can be found to within a hundred metres. Two antennae are used for the null peak method. These are just like two handheld antennae joined together. However instead of looking for where the maximum signal is you look for where the minimum signal is. The antennae each separately find the maximum, but what the receiver shows is the difference in signal between the two antennae. When the antennae is pointed straight at the animal being tracked there is no difference in the strength of the signal received by both antennae and the receiver shows this ‘minimum’, this is where the animal is. If the antennae are pointed away from the animal then one antennae will receive a greater signal than the other- this difference shows on the receiver. Why use this method? It is more accurate than hand held radio tracking, more individuals can be tracked, and more quickly.